On Campus
New undergraduate philosophy journal attracts submissions from nationwide and abroad
Call for papers draws entries from Princeton, UC Berkeley, and Cambridge
The brand-new Rutgers Undergraduate Philosophy Journal has drawn submissions from around the country and overseas in its first call for papers. As of February 29, their submission deadline, the editors had received 32 papers.
“One thing that really makes me happy is that we got so many submissions from other universities – from Princeton, UC–Berkeley, and Cambridge, among others,” said Paul Chiariello, a junior double major in philosophy and cultural anthropology, and founding editor of the journal. Chiariello expects to publish only five or six of the 32 papers received.
The journal is open only to undergraduates and is edited by undergraduates – 30 of them. The student-editors have just started to dive into the papers and plan to publish the journal for the first time both online and in hard copy at the end of April. A permanent web address has not yet been determined.
The Rutgers Department of Philosophy, part of the School of Arts and Sciences, is rated second in the English-speaking world by the influential website philosophicalgourmet.com, and has seen a doubling in the number of undergraduate majors over the past seven years, from 50 students in 2002 to 100 students today. Many, like Chiariello, are double majors. Chiariello, from Fanwood, New Jersey, is headed either for Teach for America or the Peace Corps after graduation, and then to graduate school.
The topics of the submitted papers range across the philosophical spectrum, Chiariello said, but most popular seem to be epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) and ethics. Among the titles are “Is the Extinction of Species Always a Bad Thing?” and “Purpose in a Causally Connected Universe.”
From what his editors tell him, the quality of the papers varies, too, Chiariello said. Some seem to be mere book reports; others are top-notch. “I want original, creative undergraduate essays that clearly give intelligent arguments, and the first criterion is just as important as the second,” he said.
The idea for the journal came to Chiariello last spring, while he was participating in the Semester at Sea, a summer undergraduate program sponsored by the University of Virginia. He and a shipboard classmate published a creative writing magazine that drew several submissions and even made a little money. So in the fall he raised the idea of an undergraduate philosophy journal with like-minded friends – some of them members of the undergraduate Philosophy Club; others, residents of the philosophy section in special-interest housing at Rutgers’ Demarest Hall.
Eventually, the members of the Philosophy Club elected an editorial board that included Chiariello, Kamil Kaczynski, Rachel Saitzyk, and Max Bialek, leader of the philosophy section at Demarest. The club also helped to recruit additional editors. Most, like Chiariello, Bialek, and Kaczynski, are philosophy majors. The rest, like Saitzyk, a senior at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, are philosophy minors. The journal has been an officially registered student organization since the fall and has a faculty sponsor, Martin Lin, associate professor of philosophy.
The students called for papers by pasting up handbills, asking professors to publicize the journal, and, ultimately, flooding the undergraduate philosophical universe with email. “I sent about 40 emails to philosophy departments around the English-speaking world,” Bialek said. The students had agreed upon epistemology as a general theme but decided to broaden the scope of the publication. Chiariello said the group probably wouldn’t bother with a theme next year.
Some philosophy majors have gone through other disciplines.
Bialek, a senior who grew up in Princeton, and whose father teaches physics at Princeton University, started off wanting to design computer games. He found himself wondering why people play games as they do, and then why people do anything the way they do. This took him to physics as a major, then to mathematics, and an abiding interest in cognitive science. Finally, one semester shy of graduating from Rutgers with a degree in mathematics, he changed his major to philosophy.
“I took a philosophy course, ‘Theory of Knowledge,’ from Brian Loar,” Bialek said. “And I said to myself, ‘This is it! I can use this to answer those questions!’” Bialek aims for graduate school too. And when asked what he wants to be after that, he replied, “Well, a philosopher, I hope.”